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July 29, 2014

Paris, Gaza, and the Oldest Hatred

Photo: Reuters / Philippe Wojazer

It seems that attending synagogue in Paris has
become more dangerous than running to bomb shelters in Israel. In the past
weeks, with Hamas rockets targeting all the cities of Israel, 430 French Jews,
mostly young families, arrived to make their home in Israel.

The world’s third largest Jewish community has in recent years
experienced a steady decline of its population due to emigration, mainly to
Israel but also to the US and Canada. The war in Israel will come to an end but
dangers for Jews in France, and elsewhere in Europe, will continue unless
radical change takes place within Europe, with
France the focal point of the greatest threats to Jews.

It is hard to think of the beautiful city of Paris this way. But the
reality is that Jews in Paris have been trapped inside their synagogues while
mobs rioted outside throwing Molotov cocktails and chanting“death to the Jews” and “long live Hamas.”

The pretext of pro-Palestinian protest has been completely shattered
as Jewish businesses have been torched and Jewish neighborhoods have become
danger zones for their residents.

Even if one holds the position that Israel should not defend itself
against Hamas rocket attacks, it should be obvious that shouts of “death to
Jews” and the chant, “Jews out of France,” by marchers through Paris back in
January (without the Gaza pretext) express raw anti-Semitism.

Most recently these chants have been accompanied by so much violence
that “Paris’s Kristallnacht” is an apt description. According
to Paris University professor, Guy Muilliere:

Demonstrators
also shouted slogans in favor of a man who had murdered Jewish children:
"We are all Mohamed Merah." Merah shot and killed a rabbi and three
Jewish children at close range in a schoolyard in Toulouse in 2012; it was the
one of the most serious anti-Semitic acts committed in France since the Vichy
regime. This was the first time in France that a large crowd proudly identified
with a murderer of Jewish children.

…Dozens
of windows of Jewish shops and restaurants along the route were broken and
covered with yellow labels saying, "boycott Israel". This was the
first time that so many Jewish shops and restaurants were attacked during a
demonstration in Paris.

In
addition, several hundred protesters armed with iron bars, machetes, axes and
firebombs, arriving Place de la Bastille, marched to the nearby Don Isaac
Abravanel Synagogue on rue de la Roquette. They shouted, "Let's slay the
Jews," "Hitler was right," and "Allahu Akbar".

It is
encouraging that French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls spoke out on Monday,
according to the Jerusalem Post, condemning “the use of anti-Zionist rhetoric
as a cover up of anti-Semitic opinions,” though the rioters make no such distinction. He delivered the speech on the anniversary of the 1942
Vil d’Hiv Roundup, a two-day period during which French authorities delivered 12,000
Jews to the Nazis. “The
dishonor of France,” said Valls “is to have been an accomplice of the occupier,
to have sent men, women, children, to death because they were Jews.”

Also on Monday,
after an anti-Israel protest in Toulouse, a man threw firebombs at the Jewish
Community Center and was arrested. A local Jewish community leader, Nicole
Yardeni, commented, “We endure daily insults and
get spat on--a general feeling of anxiety because a part of the population has
a poisoned mind that makes it their mission to hurt Jews, regardless of Gaza.”

During an attack
last week on a kosher restaurant in the Paris neighborhood Le Marais,“A worker of the restaurant managed to
shutter the restaurant’s anti-burglary bars, preventing the crowd from entering
and locking dozens of customers inside. The crowd proceeded to hurl various
objects at the windows while shouting ‘bunch of dirty Jews, we will
kill you’ and ‘death to the Jews.’”